Now let's zoom down just a little bit so we can see these paragraphs more separately. For this we are going to use a new keyboard shortcut, hold down the Control key or the Command key on the Mac and press the Minus (-) key at the top of your keyboard. This will zoom down a predefined amount every time you click it and then bring it down to around about 200% here. You can see that specified at the top of the Title Bar and also in the lower left-hand side of your page, and again you can use the Alt key or the Option key to scroll this page around so we can see more.
Now the idea here is that we want to do paragraph spacing in here and also in here just to separate these out a little bit more. Now there is two ways we can really do that. One way that most people do it is if we just come back over to the Main Selection Tool, click and de-select, come over to the Paragraph Styles Palette and then double-click the Intro Text Style, that will bring up the dialog box for it and then we could go down and find the Indents and Spacing option, come over here and choose either Space Before or Space After and then say OK.
It's not a very creative process to do it this way, I don't really like going through dialog box. So I am going to show you a different way slightly more organic way of doing this. Cancel that dialog out, come back over to the text frame and just double-click to highlight the type again and make sure you are inside the first paragraph. You don't have to have it selected as long as you are inside the paragraph.
Now come up to the Paragraph Formatting options in the Control Palette at the top here and the first few items here all relate to Indents and Spacing. This item right here is the spacing after the paragraph. So if we click up, maybe 1 millimeter, click again to make 2, little bit too much, just key that down to somewhere in the middle about 1.5 millimeters, and as always hit Return or Enter to say OK.
You will notice that the paragraph spacing has been added after this paragraph but not after the second one. Well, that's because we have done it manually. However, this is where the term Power Redefinition comes in. We have made a local change here to some type and that is actually reflected over here in the Paragraph Styles Palette by this small plus that appears next to the name of the style sheet. That's because we have made a change that isn't part of the original formatting.
What we are going to do, I am just going to scroll the page over here so we can see the change as it's applied. If we have a paragraph selected that contains changes that we want to apply to everything else, let's come up to the fly-out menu here on the side of the Paragraph Styles and you will see this wonderful function called Redefine Style, that takes any of the local changes, throws them into the style sheet and also applies them wherever that style sheet is used and you can now see the other two paragraphs perfectly spaced using exactly the same amount because they are formatted using the style sheet.
So we simply did an update using Redefine Styles, one of my favorite features of InDesign, the way that it does this. Now not only does it with Paragraph Styles but also with Character Styles and Object Styles which we will see a little bit later on.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services